Absent The Wrong

A woman looking for her child is lied to. An artist pitches a memorial that’s never built. A landlord raises rents. A parrot disappears. (Or does it?) Thousands of children disappear. (No question this time.) There’s family reunions, collective actions, inexplicable Mormons.

Both intimate and sweeping, raw and heady, Absent the Wrong is about 70 years of adoptees looking for answers. It’s about being the only person in the family photo who isn’t white and not daring to ask why, about having multiple heritages but knowing nothing about any of them. (So are they really heritages? Can you inherit loss?)

It’s about Ireland, Irishness, about a century of destroying families in the name of The Family. It’s about wondering, searching, loving, losing, fighting, losing some more, and sometimes finally winning when all seems lost.

Developed with performers throughout 2021, Absent the Wrong is conceived partly as a time-capsule of the response to the publication of the Mother and Baby Homes Report. The hurt, the anger, the struggle for straight answers.

But it’s not just straightforward reportage or documentary – leave that to reporters and documentarians. It’s an artistic meditation on memory, on archives, on history – on what the official record doesn’t show, has never shown, can’t show. It’s about gaps, generational and informational – how natural it is to want to bridge them, how hard it is to do.

With Once Off Productions, supported by the Arts Council.
Photos by: Ste Murray.